Alumni Oration

"Alumni Oration: By W.O. Raymond, M.A., L.L.D." University Monthly, 22, 8 (May 1903): 211-214.

Your Alumni Orator usually occupies the unfortunate position of having to address an audience already satiated with a somewhat lengthy and elaborate programme culminating in the bestowal of honors hardly won and deservedly prized, and of degrees that represent days of hard study and the burning of the midnight oil. This should be largely a student day.

If in my address—for I should rather like to disclaim the idea of an oration—I should at times adopt a somewhat lighter vein than that usually assumed by the orator on such an occasion, I trust the audience will pardon the innovation.

From all parts of the world the hearts of those who have gone out from this University turn at this season to their Alma Mater.

We, her sons, have come up to-day to this place, endeared to us by so many tender associations, not merely as a token of filial respect and esteem but to emphasize the sympathy we feel for her high interests and noble ambitions as well as our love for her sons, our nearest of kin in the great family of letters.

We today revisit, like children returning to their early homes, those halls where in our intellectual boyhood we were domiciled and taught and disciplined for manhood. We tread again the dear old walks under the spreading maples and saunter through the groves along the well remembered footpaths checkered still by the dancing shadows of the playful forest leaves, half hidden by ferns and forest herbage and made vocal by feathered songsters.

We go back to the time a quarter of a century or more ago and dream the same old dreams and feel once again the pulsation of life's springtime. For there was a time in every college year when in these beautiful precincts of the U.N.B., the month of May caused the world of nature to spring into newness of life, and that time was not conducive to study. It spoiled for us the rhythm of Homer's best hexameters, and so far as "the music of the spheres" was comprehended within the covers of Galbraith and Haughton's Astronomy it became, I fear, very dull music to our ears.

...Just thirty years ago the closing of the college year was an occasion of unusual interest to a few of your alumni who are gathered here today. The first year for our class had ended and we were merging from our status of verdant freshmen, and were about to witness for the first time the proceedings of Encoenia Day. We had entered college twenty three in number and every one of us a man. Looking back upon our year's experience we could truly say, or rather sing,

"We have fought the fight together,
We have struggled side by side."

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Our struggle "side by side" included not only the honor and terminal examinations but semi-terminal examinations and daily marks for recitation and, by the way, the average of those same daily marks counted one half in determining the year's standing, and as our names were at that time published annually in the calendar in the order of our standing, daily marks assumed importance in our eyes. I can very well remember some of the humorous situations that arose out of that system of daily marking. On a certain occasion a class mate confided to me that he had not looked at his lecture in zoology and expressed his devout hope that he might not be called up to recite. The class seated and roll call over, the professor, entirely unaware of the situation, called upon my friend the very first one. Trusting to luck and general knowledge he arose, giving me a despairing glance as he did so...(As I do not wish to name my friend I will call him Mr. Johnson.) On the occasion of which I am speaking the professor started out with a question:—"Mr. Johnson will you describe the external and internal anatomy of a cuttle fish?" The silence grew oppressive; Johnson resolved to take chances and gasped out "It's a gasterpod!" The professor observed rather sarcastically "It’s a cephelapod." The silence again grew oppressive. "Have you read this lecture Mr. Johnson?" the professor quietly asked. "No sir," was the rather sheepish answer; to which the professor responded in his politest tones, "That will do Mr. Johnson," and marked down opposite his name the score that a cricketer gets when he goes out on the first ball...

At the Encoenia thirty years ago we had a graduating class of seventeen, the largest that till then had received the degree of B. A. Among the number were several who have attained distinction, including Dr. E.M. Keirstead of Acadia, Judge Wilson of this city, Colonel E. B. Busteed of Montreal, and B. A. Smith of British Columbia. The lapse of time is seen in the fact that the graduates of thirty years ago come now to witness the graduation of their sons and daughters; to see them receive, it may be, the medals that their father's failed to gain. But this occasion demands something more than mere pleasantry.

What should be the aim and ambition of this University?

The worthy ex-lieutenant-governor of this province during his term of office took an active and intelligent interest in our Provincial University and I remember to have heard him express the opinion that in a young country such as ours we must advance rather by experiment than experience, that our young people must be resourceful and fitted to grapple with emergencies, and indeed that every man should endeavor to be a specialist along some line. Not unnaturally, the ex-lieutenant-governor highly approved of the course of study in applied science at the University.

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This University aims to train men to cope with emergencies, and the men that are ready for lesser emergencies may one day be ready for greater.

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The tendency of the age is unmistakably along the lines of specalization. The decline of the classics in the Universities of this continent and the tremendous strides made along the lines of applied science, Engineering law and medicine, as seen at McGill, Toronto, Harvard and Columbia may well cause those who uphold the old ways to pause and think. In education as in other things the world is largely ruled by the matter of supply and demand. The age is utilitarian, "Scientia est potentia"—knowledge is power: but Political Economy teaches that "knowledge is wealth," and the age demands that kind of knowledge that will most surely and most expeditiously produce wealth. The all important question seems to be: Is the University to drift with the stream and to be in the economy of the world a mere money making agency, a sort of factory that turns out human implements fitted for the production of wealth? Or to put it in plain Anglo Saxon is the University going to estimate a man by what he has or by what he is?

Young men who go forth from the walls of your Alma Mater to day, what is your conception of the nature and office of this College? We trust you have learned to look upon the College as an institution whose office it is to lead all the nobler faculties of man and to train them into harmonious and symmetrical development; a place where the physical, the intellectual and the spiritual parts of a man's nature are put to school together in the endeavor to realize the true idea of education, the making of the perfect man. A college exists not only for the needs of the age but for the needs of humanity. It must lay hold on the times and by check or stimulus as the age may require, help to form them for truth, for duty and for God. The endeavor to thus educate its sons and daughters to act well their part and be faithful to the cause of truth, of honor and of virtue; and then through them to educate, so far as may be, the age and the times should constitute the noble ambition of a University. The specialist undoubtedly has his place in the world's economy, and yet the Horatian Epithet "totus, teres, atque rotundus" is no unapt description of the truly educated scholar

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The primary object of Academic education is not to make of our young people lawyers, physicians, clergymen, chemists, geologists and the like, but only to make them MEN—to lay foundations broad and deep on which the educated young man may build up any superstructure he may wish.

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Moral science if it be something as far beyond the Pally expediency as it is this side of mere dreaming sentimentality is an element of education which I presume it were an impertinence to defend. Mental science must be acknowledged of noble and far reaching use, so long as it is admitted that the philosopher spoke wisely when he said "know thyself."

No structure that is to be broad lofty and enduring can be built upon any other foundations than those that underlie the matter, mind and language.

But after all it is not the gross amount of knowledge that a man has gotten and stored away while at college, but the ability to use his faculties aright for the rest of his life-time that tells how he is educated.

Thus I have striven to plead for the high ideal of harmonious and symmetrical development of all the faculties by University training. But this does not mean that our College is not to be adapted to meet so far as may be the needs of the age and especially the needs of our own province.

[The speaker here made a strong plea for the conservation of the forests of New Brunswick. It was a matter of vital concern to the community of today and of even greater moment for the generations to come. By its forest wealth the province may be said to have lived for a hundred years or more; by its forest wealth the province may yet have to stand or fall; save the forest!]

In concluding the speaker addressed words of welcome to the graduating class now numbered with the Alumni of the College. They would never forget the days spent within the walls of "Dear old Alma Mater, standing half way up the hill." Her honor should be theirs and they would now join with the ever growing body of graduates that had gone out into the world in the prayer,

"Floreat semper Universitas Novi Brunsvici!"